According to internal support documents unearthed by Liliputing, HP is preparing to launch a new budget notebook powered by an AMD "Mullins" APU. The HP 14Z-z000, which will also be known as the HP Stream Notebook, is a 14-inch netbook running the full version of Windows 8.1 weighing 3.9 pounds and measuring 13.5" x 9.5" x 0.7". The Stream will be the second device from HP to utilize AMD's latest mobile "Mullins" APUs (the first device being the $250 10-inch Pavilion 10z).

HP's Stream notebook is a traditional laptop-style design that uses a hinged 1366x768 display, full keyboard, trackpad, 720p webcam, and four Beats Audio speakers. However, internally, the Stream resembles tablet hardware more than laptops because the internal storage, processor, and RAM are not upgradeable. Physical IO ports include one HDMI, one USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, and a SDXC card slot.

Internally, the Stream uses an AMD A4 Micro-6400T processor, 2GB of RAM, either 32GB or 64GB of eMMC storage, a 802.11n+Bluetooh 4.0 radio, and a 32Whr battery. The A4 Micro-6400T processor is the interesting bit here, as it is a solution that has not seen many design wins yet. This APU is part of AMD's "Mullins" family which is the successor to Temash. The 28nm HKMG chip features four Puma+ cores (improved Jaguar) clocked at 1.6GHz, a 128 core GCN GPU clocked at 350MHz, 2MB of L2 cache, and support for DDR3L 1333MHz memory. The Micro-6400T is rated at 2.8W SDP (Scenario Design Power) and 4.5W TDP (Thermal Design Power). Further, it features TrustZone technology and new power management features that allow it to boost (or downclock) clockspeeds in certain situations with an emphasis on extending battery life.

HP is bundling the Stream with 100GB of Microsoft OneDrive which is free for two years.

The Stream should be available shortly with a starting price of $199 from HP. I do wish HP was less stingy with batteries in these low power systems (here's looking at you HP X360), but this Mullins-powered netbook should at least be performance competitive with existing Bay Trail based notebooks according to these Mullins APU benchmarks. I would like to see how this midrange APU (The Micro 6700T is actually the top end Mullins) stacks up to the newer Z3770 Atom.

According to DigiTimes we may see a resurgence of netbooks, this time powered by Bay Trail which will make them far more usable than the original generation. There are three postulated tiers, the $200-250 range of 10.1-15.6" models and $250-400 or $400-600 in 11.6-17.3" which will make them larger in size than the original generation which failed to attract many consumers. They are currently scheduled to ship with Bay Trail-M with future models likely to have Braswell inside in a mix of transformer style 2 in 1's with touchscreens and more traditional laptop designs. You can expect to see a maximum thickness of 25mm and a mix of HDD and SSD storage on these and we can only hope that the estimated pricing is more accurate than the pricing on Ultrabooks turned out to be.

"For the US$199-249 notebooks, Intel and Microsoft's specification preferences are 10.1- to 15.6-inch clamshell non-touchscreen models using Intel's Bay Trail-M series processors or upcoming Braswell-based processors, which are set to release in the second quarter of 2015."

Introduction, Design

The death of the Alienware M11x seemed as if it might leave a hole in the market – or not. As it turns out, that discontinuation of the world’s smallest gaming laptop coincided with the introduction of a new generic 11.6” gaming laptop chassis from Clevo. You can still get your netbook-sized game on.

Origin was kind enough to send us the EON11-S – one of several laptops based on the Clevo chassis – for review. If you’re in the North American market, the EON11-S is going to be one of the most attractive variants simply because of the company behind it. Origin is an established and well-known company with a great reputation.

The Alienware M11x, which you can still purchase (while supplies last!) ended its life at the tail end of the Sandy Bridge era. It also always relied on Intel’s low voltage processors instead of the standard models – something I noted as a disadvantage when we reviewed the M11x in 2010. The lack of an optional quad-core processor made the Alienware feel half-baked as well.

Origin’s EON11-S, on the other hand, is the full enchilada. Base models come with a Pentium dual-core, but our review unit arrived packing an Intel Core i7-3720QM. All EON11-S laptops come with an Nvidia GT 650M as well. Let’s check out the full specifications.

While the base model is priced at $999, our review unit rings up at $1,626. That’s quite a chunk of change – for the same money you could have a nicely equipped ASUS G55 or G75. Those laptops aren’t nearly as portable, however – so does gaming on the go justify the premium? Let’s find out.

Introduction, Low-Power Computing Was Never Enjoyable

It was nearly five years ago that ASUS announced the first Eee PC model at Computex. That October the first production version of what would to be called a netbook, the ASUS Eee PC 4G, was released. The press latched on to the little Eee PC, making it the new darling of the computer industry. It was small, it was inexpensive, and it was unlike anything on the market.

Even so, the original Eee PC was a bit of a dead end. It used an Intel Celeron processor that was not suited for the application. It consumed too much power and took up a significant portion of the netbook’s production cost. If Intel’s Celeron had remained the only option for netbooks they probably would not have made the leap from press darling to mainstream consumer device.

It turned out that Intel (perhaps unintentionally) had the solution – Atom. Originally built with hopes that it might power “mobile Internet devices” it proved to be the netbook’s savior. It allowed vendors to squeeze out cheap netbooks with Windows and a proper hard drive.

At the time, Atom and the netbook seemed promising. Sales were great – consumers loved the cute, pint-sized, affordable computers. In 2009 netbook sales jumped by over 160% quarter-over-quarter while laptops staggered along with single-digit growth. The buzz quickly jumped to other products, spawning nettops, media centers and low-power all-in-one-PCs. There seemed to be nothing an Atom powered computer could not do.

Fast forward. Earlier this year, PC World ran an article asking if netbooks are dead. U.S. sales peaked in the first quarter of 2010 and have been nose-diving since then, and while some interest remains in the other markets, only central Europe and Latin America have held steady. It appears the star that burned brightest has indeed burned the quickest.

Introduction, Design, User Interface, Display And Audio Quality

We have a lot of laptop reviews here at PC Perspective. As you’d expect, we generally use the same benchmarks and use the same principles whenever reviewing a laptop.

Yet we’ve never before put all of this down in writing so that our readers could understand exactly what we’re doing. Since this is a new year with new laptops to review, now is a good time introduce new benchmarks and get rid of old ones - which also makes this a good time to share information with our readers.

Design

The first page of any laptop review here at PC Perspective is dominated by some very subjective criteria.

Design comes first, and is also the most subjective. It refers to a laptop’s build quality, general layout and attractiveness. This is where we comment on a laptop’s aesthetics, and it’s also where we comment on a laptop’s perceived durability. We look at details like the display hinges, the chassis, the display lid and overall material quality. An ideal laptop design is attractive to the eye, pleasurable to touch, and feels sturdy in normal use.

Intel has been pumping out quite a few new processors lately, with new Sandy Bridge-E CPUs, a new Sandy Bridge i7 2700K processor coming out, and now a new line of Atom CPUs sneaking in the news right before the new year! Not to mention, they are also working on Ivy Bridge.

The new Atom CPUs are of the Cedar Trail variety and succeed the older Pine Trail-M Atom processors. Currently, there are three Cedar Trail chips that will be available as soon as January in OEM systems including the N2600, N2800, and D2700 CPUs. Further, the new chips are 32nm and have a 22x22mm package size. These little chips are destined to power netbooks, tablets, embedded devices (think medical devices, ruggedized tablets, machinery). Yes, Intel still believes in netbooks, and feels as though emerging markets will keep the market alive and growing as people want for cheap computers that are able to get them on the web. While the netbook is losing popularity in the US, Intel expects the South American, Eastern European, and African markets to see great interest in the netbook platform. Their netbook plans involve three price tiers with accompanying use cases including netbooks at $200 with minimal features and a price to match that enables people to access the web all the way to $400+ netbooks with lots of features that would fill out the market up to where the Ultrabook territory begins at around $900.

The new Cedar Trail processors improve upon the previous gen Atom chips by quite a bit, according to Intel. The graphics aspect in particular has been improved such that 1080p HD Youtube and HD Netflix streams are playable at at least 24 FPS. Something that early netbooks using Intel's integrated graphics will never be able to do. Intel further estimates a 50% lower TDP and a 28% processor performance increase over the Pine Trail chips. Further, the new Cedar Trail chips have more cache at 2 x 512 L2 cache(s), higher clockspeeds, lower TDP, higher C-State (C6 vs C4E)/lower power usage in sleep mode, a 200MHz higher clocked graphics card (400MHz vs 200 MHz), and increased memory speeds (DDR3 800 and 1066 vs DDR3-667). The fastest Nxx chip, the N2800 manages a .2GHz clock speed increase while also knocking off 2 watts from the TDP versus the previous top N570.

Needless to say, Cedar Trail is looking very good, on paper at least. The individual chip specifications are listed below.

CPU Clock Speed

Graphics Clock Speed

TDP

N2600

1.60 GHz

400 MHz

3.5 W

N2800

1.86 GHz

640 MHz

6.5 W

D2700

2.10 GHz

640 MHz

10 W

What are your thoughts on the new Cedar Trail chips, do you think they will provide enough "oomph" to make new netbooks desirable again? Some more information can be found here and straight from Intel here.

ASUS seems to be sitting in a very nice place in the market, with several flavours of 'killer' products, so that which ever ends up winning the form factor battle ASUS will come out with a profit. In this high tech game of rock, paper, scissors we have The Ultrabook, with their newly released Zenbook, The Netbook, their Eee series being the best known and The Tablet, being that nice looking Eee Pad Transformer. They even still sell laptops for those who prefer to exercise their arms and core. Which ever form factor becomes dominant ASUS already has a model out now, with new ones on the way, which explains the 11% growth in profit they recorded this quarter.

One major benefit ASUS has with these smaller form factors is that they all use flash memory for long term storage. With the devastation hitting Thailand as flood waters cover homes and businesses, the tech world also watches the stocks of platter based HDDs plummet. In fact ASUS reported to The Inquirer that they expect to be out of hard drives by the end of the month. That will only effect the larger form factors, ASUS may still hit the 1.8 million tablets shipped target that they are aiming for by the end of 2011.

"ASUS managed a slight increase in profit for the third quarter of this year, despite the global slowdown in PC sales.

ASUS is still shipping notebooks, but has also been strong in netbooks and has launched its own fondleslab range, all siblings to its popular Eee PC netbook, led by the Eee Pad Transformer, but to eventually include the Eee Memo, Slider and Slate."

Introduction and Design

We have our heads in the clouds. Once a dream, cloud computing is now common and used to support everything from file sharing to email. Here at PC Perspective, for example, we often make use of Dropbox. Storing certain files “in the cloud” is much easier than directly emailing them to and fro.

Google is one of the cloud’s most ardent supporters. The Internet seems to be Google’s answer to everything from emails to file sharing to document editing. All these tasks can be accomplished online through a browser with a Google utility.

When Google announced that it was going to develop an entire OS based off its Chrome web browser there was much shock, speculation and excitement. In hindsight, however, this development was probably inevitable given the company’s love of everything online. Now, Google Chrome OS is a retail product. Let’s find out if a cloud OS can compete with more traditional options.

The demise of netbooks has been greatly exaggerated, with a $400-ish price tag and at least as much power as a tablet but without the added costs or contracts, there is still a large market for these devices. The incredible sales figures we saw when this form factor originally came out will never be reached again but there still are a lot of people buying netbooks. Up for review by Matt is the HP Mini 210 with a Atom N455 and Intel's older GMA 3150 graphics inside. Is it worth saving $100 by choosing a single core netbook instead of a dual core? Read on to find out.

"This praise aside, the HP Mini 210, like most traditional single-core netbooks, sits in a market position that is increasingly awkward. The problem is the lower prices of dual-core netbooks and budget ultraportables. The HP dm1z has now been reduced to an MSRP of $449.99, and the Eee PC 1215B’s initial price of $450 has already been knocked down to about $435 on Amazon. These dual-core AMD Fusion powered netbooks are substantially quicker than the HP Mini 210, but only $100 more."